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Outsourcing Your Life Becomes Affordable

For $15 an hour, customers with GetFriday — an Indian company based in Bangalore — are paired with a personal assistant. The customer can call or email their overseas assistant, calling them by their first name (for that personal touch) and request almost anything, from helping to draft legal documents to more everyday chores such as paying bills.

A newer website, AskSunday.com is offering a free week trial of their outsourcing service.Â With their rates as low as $19 per month, anyone can afford their own 24/7 assistant.

Avinash Samudrala, co-founder of Ask Sunday, says that they have clients from Sydney to Switzerland and research teams in cities across Asia as well as the U.S. and Canada who scour the Internet to meet any requirement. Typically each request will take 20 minutes to complete with customers receiving a call or e-mail to confirm it has been completed. Ask Sunday can count housewives and salesmen among their customers, but the majority of people signing up are still the BlackBerry addicted bankers, accountants and corporate lawyers.

“I asked them to buy me a pair of shoes from a Web site a few weeks ago, so they even have my shoe-size now, but I’m not worried about online security. It’s worth it in saving the time and legwork that some tasks take up.”

While freeing us from the daily minutiae, these remote personal assistants might also be making some parts of our lives more impersonal as some people are happy to outsource more private areas of their lives.